By: Gašper Blažič
In the programme “Conversation at Hayek Café,” where I recently appeared as a guest, Jože Biščak and I also discussed how susceptible to influence people can become when they are pushed into poverty.
When a person is struggling merely to survive and put food on the table, there is little time left to think about much else. They grasp at every lifeline and naturally focus on reducing the gap between rich and poor. Slovenians are also great admirers of socialism: although we often complain about high taxes, when it comes to social security many would even accept higher taxes because, after all, you never know whether you yourself might need social benefits tomorrow. For that reason, it is not particularly difficult to convince much of the public that proposed tax cuts are merely a “scam” designed to make the rich richer while making the poor poorer. In other words: if you have little, you will end up with even less because someone else will profit at your expense. This is the mindset of the average “socialist” Slovenian. Therefore, people prefer high taxes because they know that wealthy people will also have to pay them. And so, we arrive once again at the traditional Slovenian metaphor of the neighbour’s dead cow.
For that reason, I fear that the Intervention Development Act, which will be voted on in a referendum on 6 December, may fail. If nothing else, it could be defeated through manipulation at polling stations, something that has happened before. Public attention will focus on issues only loosely connected to the referendum itself. Social inequality will attract more attention than the law’s potential effects on overall prosperity. Some people may recall that the third government of Janez Janša had already launched a project to reduce the tax burden on wages, only for the government of Robert Golob to reverse those measures shortly afterwards, without provoking significant public opposition.
So, what is the real issue? It is the power of slogans. Strong slogans are repeated constantly until they become a mantra, obscuring the substance of the debate and redirecting public attention. Before the referendum on the Parliamentary Investigation Act, people repeatedly heard the slogan “against the political police,” even though, it had little to do with the actual content of the law. The strategy obviously succeeded, because people still reacted instinctively to slogans, although to a much lesser extent than years ago, when it was as if they were voting on the fate of water itself. The essence of slogans lies in the fact that people hear them and unconsciously adopt them. Even more importantly, they stop thinking too deeply and no longer concern themselves with the substance of what is being decided, because it has already been made clear how they are supposed to vote. Slogans are meant to provoke an emotional response and “occupy” the brain so that it does not analyse the broader situation too closely. This means that public decision-making, whether in elections or referendums, becomes subject to irrational emotions. In other words: it is not the better solution that wins, but the side with the “louder loudspeakers.”
And in the end, slogans can also act as triggers for violence when they align well with the context of a kind of mass psychosis. One hardly needs to speculate about how some NGO activists would like to bring down the current government by importing violent left-wing protests such as those recently seen in France. We experienced this kind of “exercise of democracy” in Slovenia during the so-called spontaneous uprisings that, in 2012, brought down the then mayor of Maribor, Franc Kangler. While the Slovenian communist elite prevented an attempt to import the “Yogurt Revolution” from the southern parts of the former common state in 1989, today’s “proud successors” do not hesitate in the slightest to seek power through violence as well. During Janša’s third government, for example, we witnessed the so-called anti-vaccination protests, which in reality were not that at all. Although a significant portion of the numerically small far right was involved, it was clear that such protests could not have been organised without strong support from the deep state. The purpose of these protests was to undermine the government and create conditions that would allow a “new party” to win elections, a party whose very name promised “freedom.”
If we draw a line under all of this, we can quickly understand that slogans turn people into a mob.